Laura Perrins

Laura Perrins is a former barrister turned stay at home
mother. She campaigns for Mothers at Home Matter.

What is a ‘sex expert’ and where can I find one? According
to a new campaign by the Telegraph WonderWomen (who I sometimes blog for), they
are needed. Badly.

Personally, as a married women with two young children I
have been there at the beginning and know how it all turns out at the end so I
believe I am something of a ‘sex expert’. But this, it seems, is not enough to
guide my children through this particular minefield. No. We need the ‘sex
experts’ and a review of the sex education curriculum that is irrelevant to the
young and the hip.

I am not against a review per se, but that is the easy part.
Setting the content of the curriculum is the tricky issue. Claire Perry MP says
we need to teach children about the difference between pornography and ‘healthy
and caring’ relationships. Tim Loughton MP, who is also backing it, does at
least call for a values approach to sex education, but that the Department of
Education should ‘get a grip on preventing bad experiences of sex’. Really? Is
this was the Department of Education is for – to give sex advice in competition
with Cosmo? If by bad experience, it is abusive or threatening, then we already
have the criminal law to deal with that.

Laura Perrins is a
former barrister turned stay at home mother. She campaigns for Mothers at Home
Matter.

Marriage is back on
the agenda. This hottest of political potatoes has been tossed around from
vigorous supporter (Tim Loughton MP) to a lukewarm “let’s placate the masses’ David Cameron, with various groups – including Labour and the Liberal Democrats – in
opposition. So why should marriage be ‘supported’ in the tax system?

The first point is
that marriage is currently penalised in the tax system. If you are a mother
lower down the income scale and move in with a partner, the extra income they
bring into your household means you stand to lose most or all of the £3,270 you
otherwise receive in child tax credits. Harry Benson of The Marriage Foundation
estimates that there are at least 300,000 families that pretend they live
separately, but in reality are together. Similarly, higher up the income scale,
if you have children and are in receipt of child benefit you will lose it if
you marry a higher rate tax payer. You can hide your relationship from the
tax-man, as some do, but you cannot hide the fact you are married.

So this is the
starting point - that marriage is penalised in the current tax system. The second
issue is to ask: why should any person be able to transfer some of their
tax-free allowance to his or her spouse? Every adult has a tax-free allowance,
but in the UK – uniquely amongst large OECD countries, bar Mexico – it is on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. This proposal says that because marriage is distinctive, a
non-working spouse can transfer a small sum (about £150 a
year) to their spouse.

There are two grounds why the state should allow this
transfer:

The first is that the
reason why one spouse is not using their allowance is because they have
sacrificed a salary to care for their children at home. This is why Loughton’s
amendment, which would only apply to married couples with at least one child
under five, is to be preferred to the original proposal that would apply to all
married couples whether they had children or not. The state has always
recognised that raising children is a unique contribution, not just to each
individual family, but to society as a whole. With this contribution comes great
responsibility as well as financial expense which in the past the state always
– literally – made allowance for by the ‘child tax allowance,’ later child benefit.

Laura Perrins is a former barrister turned stay at home mother. She campaigns for Mothers at
Home Matter.

Shortly before
the last election, David Cameron said that “I want the next Government to
be the most family friendly Government we’ve ever had in this country and that
is about everything we do to support families and it’s about supporting every
sort of family.” Well, there is one sort of family which can only feel deeply
betrayed: for the policies introduced by the coalition have all aggravated the
pre-existing penalisation of single-income families and stay-at-home mothers.

Many single-income
families have sacrificed an income to care for their children themselves at
home. In addition to this, they pay a disproportionate amount of tax compared to
double-income families. A single-income family earning £36,000 per year will
pay £9,000 in tax whereas a double-income family earning the exactly same
amount will pay £6,500. The penalisation increases the higher up the income
scale a single-income family is. The Coalition further penalised single-income
families by removing child benefit completely for those earning £60,000;
double-income families with combined earnings of just under £100,000, where
each party earns £49,000, retain their child benefit. The reason given for
removing child benefit from higher rate tax-payers was that ‘we were all in
this together’ – but it seems single-income families are in it more than
others. George Osborne has staked his political
career on implementing the cuts in a fair way; he has failed to do so in this
case.

At this point,
the fairest and most logical policy to implement would be to honour the pledge
to introduce the transferrable tax allowance for married couples. But ignoring
the mandate given to them, the Coalition has again favoured double-income
families by introducing the childcare allowance. This allowance, worth £1,200
per child, only applies to double-income families with external child-care
costs. Families earning up to £300,000 will benefit from the allowance.
Single-income families who have sacrificed a salary to care for their children
themselves and who pay a disproportionate amount of tax and who have lost their
child benefit are explicitly barred from the scheme.

Laura
Perrins is a former barrister and stay at home mother with two small children
who campaigns for Mothers at Home Matter.

I have argued previously how the Conservative Party has failed to deliver on
its promise to be the most family-friendly Government Britain has ever had.
Before the election they talked the talk but since then they have failed to
walk the walk. Why? Why is it that the Conservatives seem so adrift as to
what the average British family wants - namely a good work life/balance, more
time to spend together and a choice for a mother to stay at home to nurture
their children, at least when they are young?

Current policy treats the economy as a trump card; if a policy can improve
GDP, it has been approved despite its wider social implications. What about the
family and the Big Society? Remember the Big Society, where neighbour would
look in on neighbour and volunteer groups would make up for the cuts to public
services? This seems to have vanished down the rabbit hole completely. To have
a Big Society, first you need a small society; and the smallest unit of society
has, for centuries, been the family. The Conservative Party is muddled as to
what the family wants because it has no idea what it stands for.

Kay Hymowitz, the American social commentator, has discussed the early American
family vividly, calling it the ‘republican marriage’ – I will refer to it as
the American family. When Europeans fled the Old World to settle in the New
World life was tough on the frontm and the ‘frontier family’ became a byword for
‘rugged and indomitable self-sufficiency.’

Hymowitz explains that ‘republican marriage provided the edifice in which couples
would care for and socialize their children to meet the demands of the new
political order. If republican marriage celebrated self-government, it also has
to pass its principles to the young; it was supposed to perpetuate as well as
embody the habits of freedom.’ The American family was not a slave to the new
Republic, but its fortunes became interdependent with it. In fact, the American
family helped the Republic to grow and flourish, and an attack on the family was
an attack on the Republic itself.